Mum-of-two Rachel Lambert was preparing to cook a pasta bake for her family when she came across a scorpion in her baking dish.

“I put the baking dish on top of the counter and I was just staring at it for about 10 minutes and thought, ‘That’s a scorpion’,” she said.

“It took a while to sink in that it was in my house.

“I thought it was a large earwig at first glance then I stared in disbelief.

“It was about 1.5 inches long, black body with brown legs and a brown sting at the end of its tail.”

The creature, nicknamed Sidney by the family, was found in one of Mrs Lambert’s cupboards where she keeps onions and garlic bought loose from the supermarket and a bag of white potatoes.

She said: “I don’t know how it got into my kitchen. I can only assume he came in the pre-packed British white potato bag that I had left open in the cupboard.

“Maybe the potatoes are bagged at a place where exotic fruit or vegetables are stored.”

Luckily the scorpion – and the family – didn’t come to any harm and was found by Mrs Lambert, from Goring, before sons Jack, five, and Reggie, three, could find him.

“My eldest son will pick up anything at the moment,” she said.

“How he got in there is a bit of a mystery. I’m just glad my boys didn’t find him.”

After she made the discovery Mrs Lambert phoned a vet but was told no one who knew how to deal with it was around. She then phoned pest control but was referred to the RSPCA which collected the creature the next morning.

In the meantime Sidney was kept in a pint glass with a piece of pierced newspaper over the top.

Mrs Lambert and her husband Mark have been renting their home in Lycroft Close for the past four months and have not seen a scorpion in the house in that time.

But just to be on the safe side the RSPCA checked the rest of the kitchen cupboards and gave them the all clear.

Stuart Hine from the Natural History Museum said the creature was a eufcorpius scorpion that was not very dangerous and would cause no more harm than a bee sting.

“We get species of eufcorpius in the UK,” he said.

The scorpion commonly finds its way here via people returning from holiday in the Mediterranean or Europe.